


History To The Defeated

by allegheny



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: M/M, Mild Metaphorical Gore, Minnesota Twins, Post-Concussion Syndrome, retirement fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 18:01:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20012503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allegheny/pseuds/allegheny
Summary: You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling.Joe's retired, Justin's broadcasting.





	History To The Defeated

They're on the couch, limbs intertwined, naked as they come if not for Joe's socks and undershirt. Justin's broadcasting tie is flung across the room, the only lingering trace of the absurd frenzy they entered the room in.

Now they're dozing, limp and mollified, Joe's soft face and his scratchy late-at-night shadow on Justin's bare, retirement-atrophied chest. 

"Can I tell you something?" He murmurs, his breath water-warm against Justin's translucent skin. 

"Mmm." Justin is somnolent. Content. Sated. Joe's broad body contained within the embrace of his arms like parentheses. 

Joe's audibly half-asleep — his voice is a whisper. Ridiculous, quiet, unsound. But he speaks still, in the certainty of partial slumber. 

“I have a dream sometimes..." He breathes out. "Nothing happened to your brain and I don’t get mood swings. I walk straight all the time and you never squint in the sun. We stand on a porch... and we make love in the grass... It's me and then you and you drive me home every time, you drive me home, every time. And I love you... and we sleep and we never grieve for... anything."

The couch disappears, and the room too, and they both float away, tangled together and holding on tight, flying through outer space to places where they're different people who made different mistakes, where trajectories alter and kinetic vectors skew, where you don't take that slide, and frontal lobes don't smash against the inside of your skull. 

But Justin's got Joe. Justin's got Joe. There's no morning, and no place for all the what-ifs they've accumulated and all the darkness they've stumbled around. There's no morning: there are dreams, and there are memories, and there's the stove-top burn of the present and Justin keeps his hand against it, fingers listening to Joe's heartbeat, prying his ribs apart and finding himself nestled between the pulsating ventricles. And then he takes his stained fingers and opens up his head, lets Joe poke around and find bruises and little cities of lonely neuroses, of fear and brain-sickness, mouth against the sober senselessness of a toilet bowl. 

They'll paint themselves in their own blood like pieces of modern art, like human statues of their bodies' horror stories. They'll flex their musles, forget about the good old days. They'll be the winners of the pageant and they'll savage or salvage each other right there on the stage, greying hair and aching joints, in stupid, boring love always. 

They're on the couch, limbs intertwined, naked as they come if not for Joe's socks and undershirt.   
Justin's known Joe for nineteen years next July. Thank fuck for absurd frenzy.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this when I woke up this morning you know how it goes with me and you are WELCOME.  
> No it's not 2008. But here you go regardless!!
> 
> Leave a comment if you liked it I guess? Stan geriatrics


End file.
